Lime Connect Partners on Ground-breaking Corporate Disability Study

By understanding employees with disabilities—and listening to their ideas—companies can unlock enormous potential.

NEW YORK (PRWEB)December 22, 2017

Lime Connect (Lime) and Bloomberg, PwC and Unilever – three of the organization’s corporate partners – are lead sponsors of a first-of-its-kind study published by the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) that finds that far more people than expected have a disability: 30 percent of college-educated employees working full-time in white-collar professions in the U.S.

Using the new, broader U.S. federal definition of disabilities (finalized in 2016, the definition now includes mental health and chronic conditions) and rigorous, nationally-representative data, CTI’s report Disabilities and Inclusion has uncovered that employees with disabilities make up an enormous talent pool that employers overlook far too often–to their own detriment.

The study also uncovered reasons that employees with disabilities have remained under the radar. Sixty-two percent of employees with disabilities have “non-visible disabilities”—people can’t tell they have a disability upon meeting them. Additionally, only 21 percent of employees with disabilities disclose them to their employers’ human resources departments.

Lack of visibility and lack of awareness about this high percentage of their workforce translates into significant costs for employers. Seventy-five percent of employees with disabilities report having an idea that would drive value for their company (versus 66 percent of employees without disabilities), yet employers may not be maximizing this potential.

“From our interviews and focus groups, we learned that people with disabilities are particularly innovative. In order to navigate the world with a disability,…